REVIEW: Angelbird 8TB SSD WRK XT and Wings X2 SSD carrier board

Solid State Drives are 'the thing' but we are often frustrated with the limited capacity. Angelbird aims to fix that with their new 8 Terabyte SSD WRK XT drive. In addition, they are releasing the Wings X2, a full-length PCie card that can be used to mount two of the 8TB SSDs inside your Mac Pro tower or Thunderbolt expansion box.

LARGE SEQUENTIAL
We used AJA System Test to benchmark file level sequential transfer speed using a 16GB test file (and 4K frame size). HIGHER number in megabytes per second = FASTEST

small randomQuickbench's Standard Test includes random transfer test sizes from 4 KBytes to 1024 KBytes. The graph shows an average of 5 test cycles. Not as impressive as large sequential transfers, but reveals performance you can expect from the OS as it does housekeeping and certain applications which perform small random transfers.HIGHER number in megabytes per second = FASTEST

WHAT DID WE LEARN?
As with most 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, the Angelbird SSD WRK XT is limited to a top speed of around 550MB/s. Because the Wings X2 board is 2-lane, the dual striped 8TB SSD WRK XT topped out at 775MB/s. Two Wings X2 boards made 1032MB/s possible but that's a small gain to use up two PCIe slots -- unless you are going for a 32TB volume.

Not shown in the graphs is a quick experiment to see if a single 8TB SSD WRK XT would mount and run reliably in a USB 3.1 Gen2 bus powered enclosure. The answer is "Yes" (at 498MB/s).

CONCLUSIONBy design, the 2.5-inch SSDs will not be as speedy as PCIe based flash blades, but a striped pair of Angelbird 8TB WRK XT SSDs on the Wings X2 PCIe carrier provides a nice balance between speed and capacity. And one more thing: the Angelbird SSDs natively support TRIM.